terça-feira, 30 de outubro de 2018

Bolsonaro: The Rise of the Brazilian Fascism

Brazil has just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic and defender of torture president. Jair Bolsonaro, former military paratrooper, nostalgic for the dictatorial period (1964-1985), which according to him was only a period of strong government regime. He considers as his idol, an army colonel, two was one of the fiercest torturers of that period.

Bolsonaro, right-wing candidate closes a short period of thirteen years, in Brazilian history, of governments led by the Workers Party (PT) of Lula, to which are added thirty-three years of moderate political alternation between the center-left and the center-right.

To have a notion of Bolsonaro’s ideology and thoughts, in an interview he said he would prefer that his son die rather than be homosexual. In front of the television cameras, he told a congresswoman that he would not rape her because she was ugly. On the other hands, the elected vice president of Brazil, an army general, is a consistent defender of coups. The president's son just elected for the Congress speaks openly about closing the Supreme Federal Court.

Encouraged by this way of thinking, the judiciary, which participated at the 2016 parliamentary coup, is censoring universities. Radical right-wing groups are openly offending and already killing gay people in the streets and attacking landless and homeless occupation camps, as well as indigenous peoples reserves.

What concretely is being designed, as a future is an authoritarian, militaristic government supported by ultraconservative religious evangelical and catholic pentecostal fundamentalist groups, which forces emerged strengthened in Brazilian Congress, after this election. It is elected a government that condemns abortion but approves approve the extermination of ethnic, LGBT + and feminist groups, as well as social movements.

A great challenge for that new government will be to get the country out of the economic crisis, which deepened after the coup of 2016. Brazil has an alarming budget deficit, 13 million unemployed and a pension system with big debts, due to large corporate debts. The new president, who clearly does not understand anything about economics, as he himself openly asserts, will leave the solution to these problems in the hands of Paulo Guedes, ultraliberal economist PhD from the Chicago school, which, in turn, shows little appreciation for politics.

Guedes aims to privatize everything he can, reduce the tax burden - serving the wealthiest - and "de-bureaucratize" labor relations. The financial market is happy because it must win in the short term. The risk rating agencies, however, express concern with the military's long-term government. The Chicago school itself is afraid of being associated with the excesses of the president-elect.

Bolsonaro government plan promises to flexibilize the socio-environmental licensing process for new extractive sector enterprises, changing many procedures, such as reducing environmental protection requirements. According to him, Brazil needs to release the mining potential of the Amazon, the 690-million-hectare rainforest located in the heart of South America, held steady. During his electoral campaign, he defended a political position to deliver the natural resources of the Amazon, to transnational corporations, eliminating environmental protection areas, extractive reserves, and NGOs, that, historically, struggles in defense of the traditional populations and indigenous people’s. He, also, threatens Brazil's withdrawal from the international climate change treaty (Paris Agreement).

Bolsonaro promised to put an end to all indigenous reservations and "quilombola" (Afro-descendant) traditional communities and intends to configure as "terrorism" the activities of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST).

So far, Bolsonaro has already announced the participation of 6 army generals, to occupy different Ministries, in his government.

The perspectives for the near future are terrible and very uncertain. However, in the last weeks, during the end of the electoral process, we are living a certain citizen awareness movement, some sectors of the population, realized an imminent danger. A certain union is being affirmed, a probable consolidation of the Broad Democratic, Popular and National Front.